UP until recently, the idea of indie versus mainstream wasn’t a discussion or even a consideration when it came to choosing a Miami hotel.

For years, it barely mattered where you stayed if you wanted to be part of the South Beach action. Collins Avenue and Ocean Drive were full of Art Deco hotels that needed renovations and a friendlier, more competent staff. Restaurants served huge overly sweet drinks and mass-market menus that resembled a knockoff version of Applebee’s, except with even more fried items. And nightlife was a decaying hotel bar or a velvet-roped nightmare.

But none of this was the point. You were in Miami for the beach, the sunshine and the beautiful people. It wasn’t about a wealth of options.

It is now.

Last Friday during Art Basel, we popped over to the new SLS Hotel for Niche Media’s annual Women in Arts Luncheon, hosted by Art Basel Miami Beach magazine’s Sue Hostetler. It was a society crowd (honorees included Beth Rudin DeWoody and Michele Oka Doner) — the kind of ladies-who-lunch event that would typically bore us into drooling slumber. But then we were introduced to French Vogue’s New York correspondent, Carole Sabas, and we started talking about how she was enjoying her stay at a cool new spot called the Freehand.

The Freehand is a youth hostel.

Just off Collins Avenue on Indian Creek Drive, the Freehand is a renovated Art Deco building (the former Indian Creek Hotel) updated by the of-the-moment Roman and Williams design team and brought to you by the developers of New York’s Ace and NoMad hotels. It feels so indie that a friend we brought there Thursday said that he loved it but that it was perhaps “a little too Brooklyn” for him.

For Miami, the Freehand and its Broken Shaker outdoor bar are a revelation. Imagine a hostel (with cozy, clean and efficiently designed $45-a-person rooms that sleep eight in bunk beds, as well as $150 private king-bed rooms) that has something like the Chateau Marmont patio in the back — but with ping-pong tables, Jenga and better drinks, thanks to cocktail mavens Elad Zvi and Gabriel Orta, who are growing basil, lavender and peppermint in their backyard and using the herbs to make potent punch bowls.

Yes, this is a spot for a “Brooklyn crowd” (Miami food-truck star Jeremiah Bullfrog is opening a restaurant here), but it’s also a destination for a sexy international set that favors conversation and making new friends over loud nightlife and tasting menus. It skews young, no doubt, but drinks with small-batch bourbon and house-made bitters are absolutely worthy of globe-trotting grown-ups.

The cocktails are also a big selling point of the newly renovated Gale South Beach, where local nightlife veteran Joshua Wagner has assembled a crew of well-known bartenders like John Lermayer at the new Regent Cocktail Club and downstairs Rec Room lounge. The former is a Collins Avenue hotel bar for people who can get into hourlong conversations about the career arcs of Sasha Petraske and Julie Reiner. The latter is inspired by No. 8, Amy Sacco and Bobby Rossi’s purposefully exclusive and, dare we say, retro NYC nightclub, which favors rock music and old-school hip-hop, funk and soul over the house music that dominates all those bottles-and-models spots nearby. Two other words about Rec Room: unisex bathroom.

The crew at LDV Hospitality — the NYC group behind Regent Cocktail Club, Rec Room and No. 8 — are also longtime restaurant pros who are opening their Dolce eatery at the Gale early next year. (A preview of the menu was served at a private Krug Champagne dinner with Adrian Grenier Thursday.) Expect wood-fired pizzas and a menu for both the Serafina salad-and-fish crowd and their pasta-loving friends who know better. And expect the coffee/juice bar just outside the restaurant, run by fashion models, to keep things sexy even at 8 a.m.

Over at the rebranded James Royal Palm on Collins, EMM Group’s Catch restaurant and SL nightclub will open soon for the Meatpacking District/celebrity set. But the hotel (with interiors from Lauren Rottet, who commissioned furniture from artists and shipped in green glass from all the over the country and Europe, and who previously worked on Aspen’s St. Regis and NYC’s Surrey hotels) is also home to Miami chef Kris Wessel.

Before opening Florida Cookery at the James Royal Palm, Wessel ran Red Light Little River, a funky regional American restaurant in a sad-looking motel on Biscayne Boulevard that served oyster pie and other riffs on the food of the southeast. That’s why even the room-service menu at the James Royal Palm now has something called Biscayne Boulevard shrimp, a spicy, messy, delicious, head-on dish with bread already dipped into the sauce on your plate. The six shrimp we got for $10 made this appetizer bigger than what passes for entrees at many South Beach spots.

Another great value served at Florida Cookery and available for in-room dining is the $12 Lee Schrager burger, served with Vidalia onions and a secret-recipe house ketchup. The burger is named after the creator of the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, a longtime champion of Wessel and a Miami food scene that’s really catching up to the rest of America.

The Miami hotel scene is finally catching up, too. The Setai brought in luxury and new energy when it opened in 2005, and the W did the same in 2009. The Delano — next to the SLS and across from the Gale — and its updated FDR lounge still bring in a top-flight crowd. And just down the block is the Sagamore, which reminded people at its annual Art Basel brunch (where the crowd started lining up at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday and was 1,000 strong by noon) that owner Cricket Taplin’s personal art collection rivals that of many museums. (The elderly woman we saw there, coming out of an elevator in a wheelchair with a bottle of Champagne in each hand, summed up Art Basel better for us than any other moment last week.)

Collins Avenue was a party wherever you looked last week. The Boulan South Beach condo/hotel building and New York’s Four Hundred concierge service threw a huge Mr. Brainwash bash, where Don Julio shots fueled the many conversations about whether Brainwash’s art really was just an elaborate Banksy prank. The renovated Marlin hotel partnered on events with the Webster high-end fashion boutique next door. And over on Ocean Drive, the uber-exclusive Villa at Barton G hotel had a swanky Andy Warhol museum party, where tens of thousands of dollars of photographs were sold.

So much more is on the way. The developers of the SLS and the W are teaming up on the remake of the Raleigh on Collins, where the city’s most spectacular chef, Michael Schwartz, is creating a new restaurant concept. Ian Schrager’s Edition hotel and Alan Faena’s Norman Foster/Rem Koolhaas/Roman and Williams colossus are in the works on Collins. Down on Ocean, the Winter Haven and Blue Moon hotels are being remade as part of Marriot’s Autograph Collection. And Thompson Hotels boss Jason Pomeranc has taken over the Hotel Victor. On Saturday, there was a party there for the new LCD Soundsystem photo book. How “Brooklyn” indeed.